The Cli-Fi Report is a portal for all things cli-fi, a subgenre of speculative fiction, with new links from blogs to videos to Wikipedia to Twitter to news links and Facebook Groups. See the portal, the largest Cli-Fi portal on the Internet at cli-fi.net / MEDIA inquiries at: danbloom@gmail.com

It was indeed nice and comforting to read the introduction to the anthology by its three editors, and also to the accompanying commentary by Kim Stanley Robinson, also included in the book, titled "Everything Change," a nod to Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood who coined the Everything Change term.

The three editors wrote in their intro:

We hope that this collection will help readers to make sense of climate

change, to grapple with all of the bewildering emotions associated with

climate imagination and climate reality, and to facilitate conversations

Kim Stanley Robinson also pronounced on ''cli-fi'' -- aand pproved of it -- and says it's here for the long haul, in his commentary in the new ASU antho:

KSR wrote:

''As part of that fidelity to the real, a lot of near-future science fiction is also becoming what some people now call **climate fiction**.[Aka cli-fi.] This is because climate change is already happening, and has become an unavoidable dominating element in the coming century. The new name thus reflects the basic realism of near-future science fiction, and is just the latest in the names people have given it; in the 1980s it was often called cyberpunk, because so many near-future stories incorporated the coming dominance of globalization and the emerging neoliberal dystopia. Now it’s climate change that is clearly coming, even more certainly than globalization. That these two biophysical dominants constitute a kind of cause and effect is perhaps another story that near-future science fiction can tell. In any case, climate fiction will be one name for this subgenre for a long time to come. This is a good thing, because fiction is how we organize our knowledge into plots that suggest how to behave in the real world. We decide what to do based on the stories we tell ourselves, so we very much need to be telling stories about our responses to climate change and the associated massive problems bearing down on us and our descendants. This book collects a number of new and exciting stories about things that will be happening soon, as people try to adapt to a changing climate and its impacts on our biosphere. It’s fair to ask whether that means that these stories are depressing and unpleasant to read; the answer is no, they aren’t, and in fact they are tremendously stimulating. This should not come as a surprise. Literature is about reality, indeed is part of the creation of reality, so it always deals with hard situations. This engagement is a crucial part of literature’s interest to us."

So it's official. ''Cli-fi'' is here to stay.

As Robinson said:

''As part of that fidelity to the real, a lot of near-future science fiction is also becoming what some people now call 'climate fiction'. This is because climate change is already happening, and has become an unavoidable dominating element in the coming century. The new name thus reflects the basic realism of near-future science fiction, and is just the latest in the names people have given it; in the 1980s it was often called cyberpunk, because so many near-future stories incorporated the coming dominance of globalization and the emerging neoliberal dystopia. Now it’s climate change that is clearly coming, even more certainly than globalization. That these two biophysical dominants constitute a kind of cause and effect is perhaps another story that near-future science fiction can tell. In any case, climate fiction will be one name for this subgenre for a long time to come.This is a good thing, because fiction is how we organize our knowledge into plots that suggest how to behave in the real world.

Kim Stanley Robinson pronounces on ''cli-fi'' -- approves of it -- and says it's here for the long haul, in his intro to the new ASU antho:
''As part of that fidelity to the real, a lot of near-future science fiction
is also becoming what some people now call **climate fiction**.[Aka cli-fi.] This is
because climate change is already happening, and has become an
unavoidable dominating element in the coming century. The new name
thus reflects the basic realism of near-future science fiction, and is just
the latest in the names people have given it; in the 1980s it was often
called cyberpunk, because so many near-future stories incorporated
the coming dominance of globalization and the emerging neoliberal
dystopia. Now it’s climate change that is clearly coming, even more
certainly than globalization. That these two biophysical dominants
constitute a kind of cause and effect is perhaps another story that
near-future science fiction can tell.
In any case, climate fiction will be one name for this subgenre for
a long time to come. This is a good thing, because fiction is how we
organize our knowledge into plots that suggest how to behave in the
real world. We decide what to do based on the stories we tell ourselves,
so we very much need to be telling stories about our responses to
climate change and the associated massive problems bearing down on
us and our descendants.
This book collects a number of new and exciting stories about things
that will be happening soon, as people try to adapt to a changing climate
and its impacts on our biosphere. It’s fair to ask whether that means
that these stories are depressing and unpleasant to read; the answer
is no, they aren’t, and in fact they are tremendously stimulating. This
should not come as a surprise. Literature is about reality, indeed is part
of the creation of reality, so it always deals with hard situations. This
engagement is a crucial part of literature’s interest to us."

Six year old Ruby's passion for saving the planet finds a big fan in famous Canadian novelist, Margaret Atwood. Dan Bloom reports.WHEN MARGARET Atwood tweets, the world listens.

And when the 76-year-old Canadian novelist chanced upon a short video of a 6-year-old girl in Australia named Ruby, talking about how she admired environmental activists like David Suzuki, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sir David Attenborough in a YouTube video she made with her mum Natalie, Atwood turned to one of her popular social media platforms – Twitter – and tweeted the link to her 1.3 million Twitter followers.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has also seen the video now, and social media is spreading the word tweet by tweet and update by update.
Meet ''Ruby, the Climate Kid,'' as she calls herself in the video. With several videos already uploaded to YouTube about protecting the planet and other ecological issues, Ruby plans to continue making short videos in the future, and slowly build a fan base. These things take time, but with a Tweet from Margaret Atwood making waves across the seas – Atwood ''facebooked'' the Ruby video link, too, according source – there's a big future for this young girl with a mind for science.

"Ruby, the Climate Kid" is a six year old Gamilaraay girl, fiercely passionate about saving the planet and alerting everyone to how dire the situation is, even if they have grown complacent, Independent Australia wrote the other day, in an article penned by her mother Natalie Cromb who serves as the Indigenous Affairs editor for the newspaper. According to David Donovan, IA's editor, the online website bills itself as "the journal of democracy and independent thought."
Ruby's mum says that from a very young age, her daughter has been influenced by people like Attenborough, Tyson and Suzuki. And now she has a new friend in Dr. Atwood.
Natalie told this reporter:

"She is an avid reader of environmental newsletters and non-fiction books about wildlife. She was appalled to find out that five animals have been declared extinct since she was born and has been determined to make a difference ever since."

In between school – Ruby is currently in Grade 1 – saving the planet with YouTube videos and making her parents laugh, she enjoys spending time with her dad and mum, family and friends at their home on Tharawal country.
When Natalie told Ruby the news that a famous Canadian novelist named Margaret Atwood, who was once 6-year-old herself and did science projects with her brother and sister in those long ago days before YouTube existed, Ruby told her mum:

"But she's so smart, how does she know about me?"

The Climate Kid: Young Scientist Entry 2016

This is my entry into the 2016 Young Scientist Model and Innovation category. Published on Aug 25, 2016.

Explaining that Dr Atwood had seen the video online and enjoyed watching it and listening to Ruby's words and Tweeted it to her one million followers, Ruby told her mum:

"I hope she likes it and thinks that I have good ideas to save our planet."

Natalie explained to a reporter why Ruby makes videos as ''the Climate Kid'' and writes about the planet, noting:

From a very young age, Ruby has shown a demonstrable interest in the world around her and she has observed and learnt a great deal.She watches Sir David Attenborough, David Suzuki and Neil deGrasse Tyson documentaries which inspire her and educate her greatly. She has a great affinity for planet life which I think is because of her culture and she genuinely believes she can help save this planet.

Ruby is now planning to make a short video to speak directly to Margaret Atwood in Canada. An early peak at the transript looks something like this:

Dear Margaret Atwood,I am so happy you saw my video about saving our sick planet. And you Tweeted the link to your one million followers and facebooked the link, too. You are so kind. I guess you were six years old once, so you understand me, just a little six year old girl in Australia. I can't believe you watched my video on Youtube! I know you care about the oceans, too. You are concerned about our warming oceans and ocean acidification. I support you, Margaret Atwood. You are my new hero. Thank you. You are 76 and I am six. There is no difference! We are kindred spirits. I love you, Margaret Atwood.

"And it is questionable whether we need our top literary talents contributing to this genre, as Amitav Ghosh argues in The Great Derangement, or if lesser writers can help us picture what the future holds for our world if manmade climate change continues unchecked."

The World of “Cli-Fi”

“Welcome to the end of the world, already in progress.”
This dystopian manifesto is the way John Joseph Adams introduces a new anthology of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” an emerging literary genre that is trying to bring the reality of climate change home in a way people can understand.
“It’s hard to imagine how a two-degree increase in the average global temperature could possibly affect you or me, or why a three-foot rise in sea level would matter to someone who doesn’t live on a coastline,” Adams writes in the introduction to Loosed Upon the World: A Climate Fiction Anthology, which he edited.
“Fiction is a powerful tool for helping us contextualize the world around us,” Adams says. “By approaching the topic in the realm of fiction, we can perhaps humanize and illuminate the issue in ways that aren’t as easy to do with only science and cold equations.”
The short stories collected in this anthology portray near futures that are unremittingly grim, often brutal, and pretty final. Adams isn’t kidding about the end of the world.
The authors represented, such as Paolo Bacigalupi and Margaret Atwood, have also written novels depicting climate catastrophes at greater length and in horrifying detail.
Bacigalupi’s most recent novel, The Water Knife, expands on a story in the anthology portraying a Phoenix deprived of water at war with a Las Vegas that is hogging the flow of the Colorado River in a world where interstate travel has been banned and Texans are the ultimate refugees because that state has no water at all.
It is a world closer to Mad Max than our present day, but whereas earlier dystopias depicted worlds devastated by nuclear war or viral pandemics, this new genre focuses on climate change as the primary cause of destroying life as we know it.
Bacigalupi’s debut novel, Hugo Award winner The Windup Girl, relies on both plague and climate to create a dystopia. Other notable catastrophe novels, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Roadand Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, portray worlds depleted by other types of extinction events but also suffering the effects of climate change. A more recent book gaining much attention, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, by Lionel Shriver, shows the effects of climate change but focuses on the collapse of the financial system.

There is little point in trying to delimit what constitutes cli-fi, or debating whether it is a sub-genre of science fiction or a class of its own. And it is questionable whether we need our top literary talents contributing to this genre, as Amitav Ghosh argues in The Great Derangement, or if lesser writers can help us picture what the future holds for our world if manmade climate change continues unchecked.

Some novels that are less ambitious or diluvial can also be harrowing. We Are Unpreparedby Meg Little Reilly depicts a rural Vermont awaiting a perfect storm that will bring flooding and freezing never before experienced even in this New England environment.
As with any good dystopian novel, the drama here comes from how people react to the catastrophe, and in this case, the preparation for the storm and its arrival test the marriage of the protagonist and a way of life cherished for generations.
Likewise, The Sunlight Pilgrimsby Jenni Fagan is mostly about the anticipation of a looming catastrophe as the calming of the Gulf Stream promises to bring plummeting temperatures, monumental snow, and calving icebergs to the western coast of Scotland.
These novels may not be as brutal as The Water Knife, where a ruthless water enforcer is the hero/antihero, and show more intimate, tender moments that we can all relate to. But don’t be fooled — the outcome is equally grim.

Everything Change features 12 stories from the ASU 2016 Cli-Fi Short Story Contest along with along with a foreword by contest judge Kim Stanley Robinson and an interview with climate fiction author Paolo Bacigalupi.

Everything Change is free to download, read, and share:

The PDF version of Everything Change was meticulously and lovingly designed and formatted by Matt Phan and Nina Miller. If it is convenient for you to read the book in PDF format, we strongly recommend it.

The anthology will also be available shortly in EPUB format through the Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo digital book stores.

The title Everything Change is drawn from a quote by Margaret Atwood, our first Imagination and Climate Futures lecturer in 2014.

And when the 76-year-old Canadian novelist chanced upon a short video of a 6-year-old girl in Australia named Ruby, talking about how she admired environmental activists

like David Suzuki, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sir David Attenborough in a YouTube video she made with her mum Natalie, Atwood turned to one of her popular social media platforms -- Twitter -- and tweeted the link to her 1.3 million Twitter followers. Neil deGrasse Tyson has also seen the video now, and social media is spreading the word tweet by tweet and update by update.

Meet ''Ruby, the Climate Kid,'' as she calls herself in the video. With several videos already uploaded to Youtube about protecting the planet and other ecological issues, Ruby plans to continue making short videos in the future, and slowly build a fan base. These things take time, but with a Tweet from Margaret Atwood making waves across the seas -- Atwood ''facebooked'' the Ruby video link, too, according sources -- there's a big future for this young girl with a mind for science.

"Ruby, the Climate Kid" is a six year old Gamilaraay girl, fiercely passionate about saving the planet and alerting everyone to how dire the situation is, even if they have grown complacent, the Independent Australia newspaper wrote the other day, in an article penned by her mother Natalie Cromb, who serves as the Indigenous Affairs editor for the newspaper. According to David Donovan, the newspaper's editor, the online website bills itself as "the journal of democracy and independent thought."

Ruby's mum says that from a very young age, her daughter has been influenced by people like Attenborough, Tyson and Suzuki. And now she has a new friend in Dr. Atwood.

"She is an avid reader of environmental newsletters and non-fiction books about wildlife," Natalie told this reporter. "She was appalled to find out that five animals have been declared extinct since she was born and has been determined to make a difference ever since."
In between school -- Ruby is currently in Grade 1 -- saving the planet with YouTube videos and making her parents laugh, she enjoys spending time with her dad and mum, family and friends at their home on Tharawal country.

​When Natalie told Ruby the news that a famous Canadian novelist named Margaret Atwood, who was once 6-year -ld herself and did science projects with her brother and sister in those long ago days before YouTube existed, Ruby told her mum: "But she's so smart, how does she know about me?"

Explaining that Dr Atwood had seen the video online and enjoyed watching it and listening to Ruby's words and tweeted it to her one million followers, Ruby told her mum: "I hope she likes it and thinks that I have good ideas to save our planet."

​Natalie explained to a reporter why Ruby makes videos as ''the Climate Kid'' and writes about the planet, noting: "From a very young age, Ruby has shown a demonstrable interest in the world around her and she has observed and learnt a great deal." She watches Sir David Attenborough, David Suzuki and Neil deGrasse Tyson documentaries which inspire her and educate her greatly. She has a great affinity​ for planet life which I think is because of her culture and she genuinely believes she can help save this planet."

Ruby is now planning to make a short video to speak directly to Margaret Atwood in Canada. An early peak at the transript looks something like this:

"Dear Margaret Atwood, I am so happy you saw my video about saving our sick planet. And you tweeted the link to your one million followers and facebooked the link, too. You are so kind. I guess you were six years old once, so you understand me, just a little six year old girl in Australia. I can't believe you watched my video on Youtube! I know you care about the oceans, too. You are concerned about our warming oceans and ocean acidification. I support you, Margaret Atwood. You are my new hero. Thank you. You are 76 and I am six. There is no difference! We are kindred spirits. I love you, Margaret Atwood."

The Great Awakening:a personal take on Amitav Ghosh's brilliant ''new'' climate change essay based on his four 2015 U.C. college lectures from the University of Chicago Press

Here's my take.First of all: the book will likely reach two main audiences: United Nations IPCC COP 22 climate policy wonks, and assorted climate scientists in state-funded think tanks and universities around the world......AND.......literary critics of all stripes and ideologies in India, the UK, the USA and AustraliaNow for my take, with book in hand:

1. It's a great, brilliant, essential and important book about climate change and the ''GREAT AWAKENING'' taking place now among activists around the world, among them Bill McKibben and Leonardo DiCaprio, in terms of creating novels and movies that tackle, head on, climate change issues in sci-fi, cli-fi and spec-fic novels and movies.

2. It's a slight book, even in the hardback edition, about the size in terms of height and width to most paperback books, and the three main chapters are for the most part a rehash of the four Berlin Family Lectures that Ghosh was invited to give at the University of Chicago in October 2015 and rewritten and amplified with over 200 footnotes -- called END NOTES in the bool -- and while it's a slight book, it's also heavy, as in "Yeah, man, what he is saying is heavy, very heavy!"

3. The chapters on politics and history are pitch perfect.

4. The chapter on how Western novelists and movie producers have been tackling climate issues was poorly researched and dropped the ball all the way along. In fact, Ghosh should have called the book THE GREAT AWAKENING, because in fact, that is what has been doing on in Western literature, vis a vis climate change and man made global warming since the 1960s. He hardly mentions this. Oops. In the lectures, he also hardly mentioned it. Double oops.

5. Throughout the entire book, the word EARTH, which stands for the name of our dear home planet called Earth, with a capital E, has been lowercased by the editors, probably in keeping with the style guide of the University of Chicago Press. Alan? In a book like this, about protecting the Earth, it is a serious mistake to lowercase the word as "earth" throughout the entire book. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I wonder what Dr Ghosh will have to say about this when he finds out?

6. One of the best parts of the book are the 216 END NOTES at the end of the book that are kind of like footnotes but not really footnotes. More like eye-notes. Very good and one of the best parts of the book and worth reading. I read the END NOTES over and over three times! Fascinating stuff there.

7. The Great Awakening is a wake up call for humanity and a wake up call for novelists and screenwriters in the West and in India and worldwide -- Africa and South America and all of Asia, including communist China and free democratic Taiwan, and ''cute'' Japan, too -- to continue waking up and using their skills and talents and voices as artists and writers and poets and film directors and climate activists to keep doing that they are doing: tackling these isuses with their art. So they book is not really about any grea derangement. It's about THE GREAT AWAKENING. Think about that as you are reading it.

[8[. [One irony of irony things that has nothing to to do with Dr Ghosh, since I am sure he had no idea and no knowledge of this, but for a hardhitting leftwing tract that takes strong issue with Western imperialism and colonialism, and pretty much pisses on the entire Anglosphere, whatever that is -- read the book to find out -- the Berlin Family lectures at the University of Chicago which sponsored the four lectures that comprise the book's essense and which stipulated that a book HAD to be published after the lecutres BY the University of Chicago Press -- a brilliant PR and marketing move and a good thing, too, because now we have this book in our hands and BRAVO to Dr Ghosh for having written it, despite its few flaws -- but the irony of ironies is that the the USA philanthropy in Chicago that funded the lectures and the book gives SOME of its money to an imperialist and colonial state in the Middle East, and for a book that attacks imperialsim and colonialism ...to be funded by a philanthropy that does just the opposite, supports imperialism and colonialsm in the Middle East -- and I am sure Dr Ghosh knew nothing about this, although the information has always been on the University of Chicago website for anyone to see -- well, look at this: ''Melvin Berlin and his wife, Randy, a retired lawyer and currently a lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School, also support 20 post-combat Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.'']

[Not that it matters, and it's really not interesting at all, and not part of the book's message at all. But we live in an impure world, don't we? Globalization and imperialism and capitalism and all that! Oy!]

The 2015 Berlin Family Lectures with Amitav Ghosh "The Great Derangement: Literature, History, and Politics in the Age of Global Warming" Lecture one: "Fiction I" September 29, 2015 In the first lecture of the 2015 Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lecture Series, renowned author Amitav Ghosh explores the impact of ...

The 2015 Berlin Family Lectures with Amitav Ghosh "The Great Derangement: Literature, History, and Politics in the Age of Global Warming" Lecture one: "Fiction II" September 30, 2015 In the second lecture of the 2015 Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lecture Series, renowned author Amitav Ghosh continues his exploration ...

Friday, September 23, 2016

The fifth track from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' 2016 album Skeleton Tree. The title, “Anthrocene”, is a variant of the proposed scientific term Anthropocene (from Greek anthro- or anthropo- meaning “man” and -cene meaning “new” or “era”).

“Anthropocene” refers to the modern geological era, when human activities such as burning fossil fuels began to have a significant impact on the Earth.

While the concept “anthropocene” began as an academic model, its use has broadened to literature, art and even popular culture.

It’s use by Cave on “Skeleton Tree” somehow seems analogous to the song “Higgs Boson Blues” from his previous album, “Push the Sky Away, where an arcane, but newsworthy idea is treated as a metaphorical device to draw out the composer’s profound emotions.

In "Higgs Boson Blues,” particle physics is used to highlight culture’s strange ability to compress space and time into a dense, meaningless void.

In “Anthrocene,” Cave seems to draw an ironic parallel between the evolutionary effect of man to his environment, while singing about what it means to be eternally human — love, loss, longing.

lyrics
[Verse 1] All the fine winds gone And this sweet world is so much older Animals pull the night around their shoulders Flowers fall to their naked knees Here I come now, here I come I hear you been out there looking for something to love The dark force that shifts at the edge of the tree It's alright, it's alright When you turn so long and lovely, it's hard to believe That we're falling now in the name of the Anthrocene

[Verse 2] All the things we love, we love, we love, we lose It's our bodies that fall when they try to rise And I hear you been looking out for something to love Sit down beside me and I'll name it for you Behold, behold The heaven bound sea The wind cast its shadow and moves for the tree Behold the animals and the birds and the sky entire I hear you been out there looking for something to set on fire The head bow children fall to their knees Humbled in the age of the Anthrocene

[Verse 3] Here they come now, here they come Are pulling you away There are powers at play more forceful than we Come over here and sit down and say a short prayer A prayer to the air, the air that we breathe And the astonishing rise of the Anthrocene

[Outro] Come on now, come on now Hold your breath while you're safe It's a long way back and I'm begging you please To come home now, come home now Well, I heard you been out looking for something to love Close your eyes, little world And brace yourself

By Amitav Ghosh

September 6, 2016

Mr. Ghosh, among others, has misunderstood the situation in Bangladesh with respect to climate change. A 2014 peer-reviewed article in "Climate Risk Management" by Hugh Brammer addresses this. "Bangladesh’s dynamic coastal regions and sea-level rise".
His introduction is to the point..."There is a widespread misconception that a rising sea-level with global warming will overwhelm Bangladesh’s coastal area contour by contour and will thereby displace as many as 10–30 million people in the 21st century e.g., (Gore, 2009; Houghton, 2009). In some accounts, that situation will be aggravated by high rates of land subsidence (Syvitski et al., 2009), a recent doubling of the rate of sea-level rise (Smith, 2012) and rapid, on-going rates of coastal erosion (Vidal, 2013a,b). The accounts given to-date imply that the Bangladeshi people are helpless against a rising sea-level and will be unable to resist the rising water. Those assumptions and descriptions are incorrect. Bangladesh’s coastal area is not uniform, nor is it static. It is dynamic, and so are the people of Bangladesh."
Mr. Ghosh describes Hurricane Sandy as improbable and unprecedented. This is another misunderstanding. A hurricane called "The Long Island Express" devastated the same region in 1938. Wikipedia has described it...
"Hurricane Sandy not the first to hit New York: A 1938 storm 'The Long Island Express' pounded the Eastern Seaboard. The storm formed near the coast of Africa in September of the 1938 hurricane season, becoming a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane scale before making landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on Long Island on September 21. Long Island was struck first, before New England, Vermont, New Hampshire and Quebec, earning the storm the nickname the ‘Long Island Express’. The winds reached up to 150 mph and had waves surging to around 25–35 feet high.[The destruction was immense and took a while to rebuild. The western side of the hurricane caused sustained tropical storm-force winds, high waves, and storm surge along much of the New Jersey coast. In Atlantic City the surge destroyed much of the boardwalk. Additionally, the surge inundated several coastal communities; Wildwood was under 3 feet (0.91 m) of water at the height of the storm. The maximum recorded wind gust was 70 m.p.h. at Sandy Hook.
In 1938 (one of the warmest years on record in the US) this extreme weather event might have been improbable and unprecedented, but not today.
A point to be made? Will authors years from now ask if the unimaginable was our lack of appreciation for historical climatology, our rush to a "settled science" and a misguided attempt to mitigate the climate quickly with improbable technology? Have we learned nothing from our experiences in the 1960s and 70s?

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Some thoughts on the rise of the cli-fi genre in the past ten years, and what the future might hold in the next 50 years of cli-fi=====================A new generation of climate fiction dubbed cli-fihas emerged in the last ten years, marking the strong consensus that has emerged over climate change and global warming. Here are some gathered thoughts from a wide variety of sources on the rise of the cli-fi genre, and what the future might hold in the next 50 years of cli-fi.Many cli-fi novels representing this genre focus on themes common across similar books: their framing of the climate change problem, their representations of science and scientists, their portrayals of economic and environmental challenges, and their scenarios for addressing the climate challenge. Cli-fi novels illustrate in varying ways the problems attending the science-society relationship, the economic imperatives that have driven the characters’ choices, and the contradictory impulses that define our connections with nature. Such novels provide a picture of the challenges that need to be understood, but scenarios that offer possibilities for change are not fully developed. Such cli-fi books represent a given moment in the longer trajectory of climate fiction while offering the initial building blocks to reconsider our ways of living so that new expectations and imaginaries can be debated and reconceived. Over the past decade, a strong consensus has emerged over climate change posing risks that could end civilization as we know it.Not surprisingly, astrong cultural response in the form of climate fiction or “cli-fi”has developed.''Climate fiction'' aka cli-fi is a cultural response to mostly scientific and policy discourses that offers a way of exploring dramatic social change through the perspectives of individual and social group experiences by way of fictional narrative. So how is climate change ramed in cli-fi novels? We must investigate their various themes that provide templates for describing climate change as lived experience, and identify and understand the expectations that might underlie scripts of the future. The term “cli-fi” has been adopted by the popular press, and stories about this burgeoning genre began appearing in various media outlets worldwide, in several languages.In the summer of 2014, the The New York Times ''ROOM FOR DEBATE'' forum section online created a discussion page in its online opinion section asking the question “Will fiction influence how we react to climate change?”, inviting published authors and climate change activists alike to comment and debate. Some saw the works as a catalyst to reflect our anxieties about climate change, while others saw fiction as a way to make the issue more palatable to the general public in order to motivate them to take action. As part of a marketing campaign in 2013 -- POLAR CITY RED by Jim Laughter -- Dan Bloom initially identified cli-fi as a ''subgenre'' of SF, but merely to get along better with those in the science fiction community. For Bloom, Cli-Fi has always been, in his mind, a standalone, separate, independent genre.Cli-fi novels have features that make them better positioned to explore the political, scientific, and cultural dimensions of climate change. Cli-fi novels are able to portray futures at planetary scales and make connections between global threats and individual lives, a pointed weakness in the old environmental movement. Cli-fi novels are able to focus attention on the “what-if” scnario, a way of imagining the world that that provides a bridge to considering imaginative ways of how we “adapt” or “mitigate” beyond the confines of policy and scientific thinking. ''Oryx and Crake'', often called the number one cli-fi novel, uses climate change as backdrop to the chronicle of an apocalypse, told through the story of the last living human, Jimmy, nicknamed Snowman. Cli-fi is a “new” genre that is indicative of the urgencies of the climate change issue in the last decade and a half despite and reflects a joint enterprise among writers, readers, journalists, and marketers, suggesting that attribution of the identity of cli-fi novels to a text constitutes an active intervention in their distribution and reception.Some pronouncements about the cli-fi genre have promoted the idea that such works, rather than simplistically “educating” the public, try to represent our deepest cultural fears, while others claim they change minds. The idea of climate change has different meanings and implications that are in the process of taking hold, becoming a catalyst for rethinking the status quo, and pushing us to construct new imagined worlds. There are rich fictional possibilities for the cli-fi genre to provide an opportunity to explore the tensions that arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging with nature.Climate fiction goes beyond simplistic expectations because it does not merely address climate change but investigates potential and complex human reactions under situations of stress and change. They often present a broad diversity in character, plot, and setting. The complexities are demonstrable in the representations of the changing climate, the framing of science and scientists, the economic underpinnings, and environmental dimensions.Simply put, in cli-fi novels, climate change is about change. The novels we read today set the problem of climate change in different ways. In some, climate change is a lived reality; in others, it serves as backdrop to the excesses of a highly technologized society. The characters also have different levels of understanding or beliefs about climate change, not unlike the landscape of opinions among different social groups. Think on this: The glaciers that keep Asia’s watersheds in business are going right away. . . . The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, the canary is dead.The crafting of many cli-fi novels goes beyond common expectations about climate change as they do not fall neatly into the ecology box, showing instead the complexities of being “green.” Cli-fi novels are not manuals for environmentalists nor do they blithely promote the environmental cause. The novels do not necessarily take the earnestness of the environmental movement seriously, and there is a self-conscious awareness of the extreme dedication required to live sustainably and the frequent contradictions that emerge.Situating climate change problems within the social as many cli-fi novels do can elucidate the complexities of AGW problems in ways far removed from temperature charts and other scientific ways of understanding climate change. Many cli-fi novels offer “new theories” to transform our social imaginaries and revise expectations. While new theories or clear solutions are not presented, what these novels do is outline the complexities of anticipating or living with climate change. They articulate the inconsistencies embedded in our hopes and desires, they make visible the complexities behind the broader circulation of scientific knowledge in society, and they portray the contradictions in expectations about technological solutions. Acknowledging the complexities of this problem is an important first step. That there are multiple ways of knowing about climate change is reinforced in many cli-fi novels, sometimes even through satire. So “how do cli-fi novels construct climate change? Many such novels examine the issues surrounding the experience of climate change and explore the potential collective experience of social upheaval in unique ways through individual lives and community experiences, painting the global climate challenges through palettes of the local and the personal. That's cli-fi.What unites many cli-fi novels is the idea of “complexity.” None of them for the most part resolve their issues in any complete or satisfactory way. There are no happy endings, but survival continues. While the scientific and policy frameworks on the climate have been defined by their formal methods and rules to ensure an “organized subjectivity,” the diverse ways of confronting an issue in personal or community terms that are both complex and, in some cases, divisive are suggested in many good cli-fi novels, helping uncover the many meanings of climate change.Cli-fi novels also provide an escape of sorts where alternate realities can be explored, allowing readers to become more aware of concepts or scenarios that they had not previously considered.On a societal level, just as science has raised expectations for the “good life” arising from the fruits of scientific labor, so have such outcomes also been blamed for the ills of modernity, what one pundit has called “the double face of science”. This theme can also be skillfully drawn in cli-fi novels. So cli-fi novels can go one step further, putting conflicting expectations on full display, satirizing our human predicaments, representing science through a skeptical lens, and “narrating the essential political nature of being human.” The performative dimension of expectations in this context forces readers to grapple with such contradictions before avenues for solutions can be reconsidered. In most cli-fi novels, climate change as cultural concept becomes a lived experience rather than a scientific projection, promissory of challenges rather than utopic solutions. Such novels are adept at tracing human and institutional shortcomings, but some scenarios and story arcs that might provide some exemplars of the challenges (or opportunities) of living with climate change are not always accessible. Most cli-fi novels are proficient at tracing human flaws and institutional shortcomings. Such portrayals of risks, hurdles, or human weaknesses are important building blocks for imagined expectations of the future; they need to be complimented with avenues for imagining solutions. Cli-fi novels may be illustrative of the present cultural moment we find ourselves in in 2016, a time when more realist scenarios of living under climate-changed contexts are not as frequently used, reflecting “a transition point,” “an evolving literary phenomenon” in the trajectory of cli-fi.This cli-fi novels call for storylines reflecting other locales and cultures, whose experiences with climate change foreground different trajectories of this global problem. Such cli-fi novels speak to the function of popular culture through fiction as pedagogical, not only emulating the varied standpoints that exist in the surrounding society, but providing a forum for how they may also serve as a catalyst for reconsidering our ways of living and surviving so that new imaginaries can be debated and collectively reconceived.